Hello, On Thu 02 Aug 2018 at 10:14AM +0100, Simon McVittie wrote:
> In the past, it has been asserted that maintainers are required to > paste the text written by upstream that tells the consumer that they > may redistribute the package under a specified license, verbatim, > into the copyright file. That's what I meant whenever I said "license > grant" on this bug. (Not to be confused with the text you can find in > /usr/share/common-licenses, which tells you what the terms of the GPL > are, but does not tell you that you can distribute any particular piece > of software under those terms.) > > [...] > > The reason I am being so pedantic about this is that previous statements > from the ftp team have implied that paraphrasing the license grant text > provided by upstream (for example simplifying "This program is free > software; etc." into "License: GPL-2+") is not acceptable, and I want > to be sure that this rule has intentionally been changed. Right. In my role as one of the maintainers of Policy, I do not consider the single e-mail we have from Joerg in the other bug sufficient to confirm that we can write in Policy "The license grant need not be included." Given that the ftp-team have previously explicitly said that the paraphrasing is not acceptable, we need an explicit statement that their view has changed. I hope that those driving this proposal do not find this too frustrating, but we would really not be improving things if we added that statement, only to find packages being rejected from NEW because their copyright files did not include license grants. We need to be sure. > (For clarity, I think what you said is a very valuable simplification, > and I would love to be able to stop copying and pasting upstreams' > license grant text.) Yes. I too very much hope we can improve the status quo. -- Sean Whitton
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